DANNY LEE WYNTER
Speaking up for birthday boy — and my hero — Kenneth Williams
OPINION
I WRITE THIS, MY FINAL COLUMN FOR ATTITUDE, on what would’ve been Kenneth Williams’s 92nd birthday.
Ken’s always been a huge part of my life. I own every book written about him. Whenever I do a play he’s one of a small handful of people whose picture I pin to my dressing room mirror; a postcard of a photo that was once on display in the National Portrait Gallery.
One New Year’s Eve I was lucky enough to talk to his friend Sheila Hancock and asked her about his diaries. “None of us knew till we read them just how depressed he was,” she told me. I recalled the Virginia Woolf inscription Ken wrote in one of his entries: “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.”